are dwelt upon with an exclusive devotion more or less prejudicial to
immediate practical ends. This is why young men, and even striplings,
provided they are energetic and persuasive, will be listened to with
attention at such eras. Men are seeking for enlightenment, and hence
views are taken for what they seem to be worth rather than out of
respect for the source they spring from. Imagine, then, this tall,
fair, strong-faced boy of fourteen, mounted, perhaps, on one of his
own flour-barrels, dogmatizing the principles of social democracy,
posing as a spontaneous political reformer before a crowded street
full of men twice and thrice his years, but bound together with him
by the sympathies common to the wage-earning classes. It is true that
Isaac Hecker and his brothers, of whom the eldest had but recently
attained to the dignity of a voter, although still poor and
hard-working, had already, by virtue of sheer industry and pluck,
passed over to the class of wage-payers. But they were not less
ardent reformers after than before that transition. Isaac at all
events, was consistent and unchanged throughout his life in the
political principles he adopted among the apprentices and journeymen
of New York over half a century ago. There was little room for vulgar
self-conceit in a nature so frank and sincere as his. What he had to
learn, as well as what he had to teach, always dwarfed merely
personal considerations to their narrowest dimensions in his mind.
Hence his impulsive candor, the clearness of his views, and the
straightforward simplicity of his speech at once attracted notice,
and although so young, he went speedily to the front in the local
management of his party. In the article already quoted from, he tells
us that after 1834 the managers left all future engagements of
lecturers to his brother John and himself. It was doubtless this fact
which led directly to that lasting and fruitful intimacy with Dr.
Brownson which then began. His was the strongest purely human